Prof Dr M.H.M. Winands

Mark Winands is the chair of the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences. He is a professor in machine reasoning, especially focussing on heuristic and adaptive search. He has published in international journals such as Artificial Intelligence Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Journal of AI Research, Knowledge Based Systems, Information Sciences and Theoretical Computer Science. He is widely known of investigating underlying principles of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for which he has received two NWO grants. He is frequently invited to speak on this topic at international meetings. Regarding other intelligent search techniques, he has made contributions in the minimax framework, hierarchical task networks and proof-number search.

He has been (co-)organizing several symposiums, workshops and conferences, such as the International Conference on Computers and Games 2008, the Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2012, and the Computer Games Workshops at IJCAI 2013/2015/2016/2017 and ECAI 2012/2014. He has been the program chair of the 15th International Conference on Advances in Computer Games, and the general chair of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. Next, he serves as the editor-in-chief of the ICGA Journal (IOS Press), editor of Theoretical Computer Science, and as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Games (TOG). Next, he is a member of Games Technical Committee (GTC) | IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and vice-president of the International Computer Games Association. At the national level, he is a member of the Board of Governors for the Dutch research school for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), member of the Kennistafel AI, and member of ICT platform Nederland (IPN). For the latter he also serves as a member of the Special Interest Group AI.

Next, Mark Winands has been very active in the organization of education. He has been the director of studies for the Bachelor Program Data Science & Knowledge Engineering (2010-2013, and 2017-2019), and the two Master Programs Artificial Intelligence and Data Science for Decision Making (2010-2013, and 2017-2020), which during his tenure have reached the number 1 position in the Keuzegids and Elsevier rankings. He also led the re-accreditation of these programs in 2013 and 2019, and led the accreditation of the Bachelor Computer Science in 2022. He has also been coordinating and organizing the service education at RWTH Aachen, University College Maastricht, Maastricht Science Programme, and the master System Biology. In the past, he was also the Chair of the Board of Examiners (2014-2016), and Chair of the Board of Admission for both master programs (2015).